Motive Retail

When Motive Retail first approached us, they had two key solutions in place: Motive Integrator (later rebranded as MIX), which connected automotive partners via APIs, and a desktop app for managing certification workflows (which would later become Certify). But both systems had to evolve to handle the scale, flexibility and user experience Motive Retail envisioned.

We faced two major challenges: One was rethinking the API certification process so integrations could be tested and approved before going live. We would need to carry out a full rewrite to create the platform now known as Certify. 

The other was expanding Motive Integrator to meet growing business needs. An early transition from a desktop app to a Liferay-based web portal solved accessibility at first, but soon revealed new problems: performance bottlenecks, hefty maintenance requirements, and increasing misalignment with growth goals.

To address these issues, we evolved Motive Integrator into MIX. Certain functions, like secure subscription approvals and dealer data governance, needed to be separated into dedicated services (Activate, Admin panel) so that each could evolve independently and scale better. We also needed to add a new tool, namely Console, for real-time usage analytics of API traffic to give manufacturers and internal teams visibility into request errors and performance patterns. Here, our main challenge was building new features to strengthen architecture, stability and performance, so MIX could handle a growing network of integrations.

It meant tackling architectural complexity, keeping performance stable under high load, and coordinating interactions between various user roles across interconnected systems.

This combination of strategic and technical involvement defined the key requirements and challenges we tackled:

• Modernizing legacy architecture: Their original tech, including the Liferay-based portal, outdated frontend components, and older Java modules were increasingly hard to maintain and scale, driving up long-term maintenance costs. Over the years, many features had evolved organically without consistent design patterns or architecture. Updating and refactoring these components required careful planning to avoid regressions and maintain platform uptime.
• Supporting a multi-role ecosystem: The ecosystem serves a wide variety of users, manufacturers, subscribers, dealers and internal admins, each with unique workflows and permissions. This meant ensuring stability across several independent tools (Certify, Activate, Console, Admin) while guaranteeing smooth communication between them with open endpoints and shared logic.
• Maintaining high performance under growing user and data loads: With hundreds of thousands of requests passing through Activate daily, and thousands of certification requests handled by Certify, performance and infrastructure design became critical. We needed to introduce best practices like asynchronous processing (with AWS SQS), multithreading, caching and request optimization for consistent speed and reliability across both certification and subscription activation.
• Delivering new features alongside maintenance: With increasing user needs and pressure to surpass competitors, our team was often tasked with introducing new functionality, like building automated billing and dealer approval flows, while keeping production systems stable and responsive. This required strategic feature release planning to deliver improvements quickly without disrupting ongoing operations or user workflows.
• Building internal tooling to reduce system load: As certification requests increased, Certify had to validate a growing number of XML files. Each had structured data that needed to be checked against manufacturer-defined rules, a computationally heavy process that slowed Certify during peak usage. To reduce Certify’s workload, improve user processing speed and keep performance predictable, we needed to design and implement a Validation API–a separate, high-performance service dedicated to XML validations.
• Coordinating long-term development across a growing ecosystem:Continuous delivery while building out multiple interconnected systems required close coordination across parallel teams, careful version management, and maintaining stability for hundreds of thousands of daily requests in live production.